Out of the Darkness

“No,” Pekka answered, and walked past her. She would have walked through her if the crystallomancer hadn’t scurried out of her way.

The next thing Pekka knew, she was standing in from of the door to her own room. She went inside and barred the door behind her. She hadn’t run into anyone on the way-or if she had, she didn’t remember it. She threw herself down on the bed and started to weep. All the tears she’d held back or been too numb to shed came flooding out.

Fernao will wonder where I am, wonder what’s happened, she thought. That only brought on a fresh torrent of tears-these, tears of shame. Powers above, if the knock on the door had come a few minutes earlier, we’d have been making love. Wouldn‘t that have been a perfect way to find out Leino was dead?

“It was only because you weren’t here,” she said aloud, as if her husband stood beside her listening. But Leino didn’t. He wouldn’t, not ever again. That finally started to strike home. Pekka wept harder than ever.

After a while, she got up and splashed cold water on her face. It did no good at all; looking at herself in the mirror above the sink, she saw how puffy and red her eyes were, and how much she looked like someone who’d just staggered out of a ley-line caravan car after some horrible mishap. Even as she dried her face, tears started streaming down her cheeks once more. She threw herself down on the bed again and gave way to them.

She never knew how long the knocking on the door went on before she noticed it. Quite a while, she suspected: by the time she did realize it was there, it had a slow, patient rhythm to it that suggested whoever stood out there in the hallway would keep on till she gave heed.

Another splash of cold water did even less than the first one had. Grimly, Pekka unbarred and opened the door anyhow. It might be something important, something she had to deal with. Dealing with anything but herself and her own pain right now would be a relief. Or, she thought, it might be Fernao.

And it was. The smile melted off his face when he saw her. “Powers above,” he whispered. “What happened, sweetheart?”

“Don’t call me that,” Pekka snapped, and he recoiled as if she’d struck him. “What happened?” she repeated. “Leino. In Jelgava. The Algarvians.” She tried to gather herself, but had no great luck. The tears came whether she wanted them or not.

“Oh,” Fernao said softly. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry.”

Are you? she wondered. Or are you just as well pleased? Why shouldn’t you be? Your rival is out of the way. How convenient. Nothing she’d ever seen from Fernao, nothing he’d ever said, made her believe he would think, did think, like that. But she wasn’t thinking very clearly herself right then. Sometimes, she did think clearly enough to understand that.

Fernao started to come into the room. Pekka stood in the doorway, blocking his path. He nodded jerkily, then bowed, almost as if he were an Algarvian. “All right,” he said, though she hadn’t said anything aloud. “I’ll do anything you want me to do. You know that. Tell me what it is, and I’ll do it. Only. . don’t shut me away. Please.”

“I don’t want to have to think about that right now,” Pekka said. “I don’t want to have to think about anything right now.” But she couldn’t help it; what ran through her mind was, Oh, powers above-I’m going to have to let Uto know his father isn‘t coming home from the war. That was another jolt, almost as bad as hearing the dreadful news from Juhainen. “For now, can you just. . leave me be?”

“All right,” he said, but the look in his eyes-so like a Kuusaman’s eyes in shape, set in an otherwise purely Lagoan face-showed she’d hurt him. “Whatever you want me to do, or don’t want me to do, tell me. You know I’ll do it… or not do it.”

“Thank you,” Pekka said raggedly. “I don’t know what the etiquette is for the wife’s lover when the husband dies.” Spoken in a different tone of voice, that might have been a joke. She meant it as a statement of fact, no more.

Fortunately, Fernao took it that way. “Neither do I,” he admitted, “at least not when-” Several words too late, he broke off. At least not when the lover has nothing to do with the husband’s demise, he’d been about to say: that or something like it. Lagoans weren’t quite so touchy or so much in the habit of taking other men’s wives for lovers as Algarvians, but some of the romances Pekka had read suggested they did have their rules for such situations.